books: reading, editing, publishing

Your new favourite writer

Having failed to provide you with any undiscovered gems in my books of the year list, I’m going to do so now. This is a post in which I recommend a great author that you have quite possibly not heard of (especially if you’re reading this from the UK), you go and buy books by said author, and come back and tell me that she’s brilliant and I was right. Easy.

And that writer is Maddie Dawson. I have struggled to describe exactly what her books are for some time, but luckily Dawson herself has managed to do it pretty eloquently on her twitter biog, where she says: ‘Writer of novels with crazy families, secrets, and reasonably happy endings. Like life.’ I would query only the ‘crazy’ part, as her families are only crazy to the extent that all of our families are. These are books about love, family, relationships, parents and children, siblings etc. They are acutely observed but also well plotted. They are my dream type of book. To give my own view on this, without consulting the Amazon ‘also bought’ links, I would say they would appeal to you if you like writers such as Emily Giffin, Jennifer Weiner, Kristin Hannah. They are a type of book that the US have always been better at selling than we have here in the UK.

The first of Dawson’s books that I read was The Stuff that Never Happened. A US colleague gave me a copy on a work trip in 2014, and I stayed up to read the whole thing on a night flight home. It’s a book about ‘the one that got away’, essentially, but if you feel you’ve read a version of that before – you haven’t read many as good as this.